


Girls Take Your Hands Like You Pray

by oneoneandone



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29143140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneoneandone/pseuds/oneoneandone
Summary: One Indian summer.
Relationships: Tobin Heath/Christen Press
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	Girls Take Your Hands Like You Pray

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt**   
>  _here’s a preath prompt -“have you ever gone skinny dipping?”_
> 
> I have no explanation for this aside from the fact that I reread To Kill a Mockingbird this weekend.
> 
> And I’m breaking from my “no individual posts for things under 1000 words” rule because there is a small (very very small) chance I might come back to this one.

There was a breeze overhead, somewhere rifling through the very tops of the trees, but the air closer to the ground was still and stifling. It was the very middle of another hazy afternoon in late mid-August, caught between the bright heat of July and the relieving cooler days of September as it ushered the autumn in. The kind of afternoon that sucked all the energy and drive from a person’s body, weighing them down with a languor that even the most active of people had a hard time shaking off. Somewhere, off in the distance, a storm threatened. The kind that would make the land sing with joyful relief, the ground greedily soaking up the proffered oblation, doors and windows thrust open to welcome the cooler air and the revivifying rain. Old women on old porch swings under peeling eaves, childen chasing each other in the dust turned mud.

Later, they’ll find themselves laughing as the torrents drench them on the short walk home, leaping and splashing in the puddles where the earth can’t keep up with the life-giving sacrament. But for the moment, the sky is clear but for the unending reach of the sun, the blistering heat baking away at what remains of the spring grass, greens long since faded into golden browns. There’s a hammock along the river, little more than a crick, really, and they take their afternoons in the refuge of the little shade the trees that grow along the bank offer, swaying to and fro as the sounds of the day pass them by.

It’s too hot, really, to be so close, skin to skin to skin, sweat settling between their breasts, their thighs pressed against each other, the smalls of their backs against the thick canvas of the hammock. It’s too hot but it doesn’t matter, not to the girls half dozing in the heady feel of summer against their skin. Not in these secret stolen moments together, alone but for the birds, but for the whisper of the hammock through the air, but for the soft rush of the water.

“Hey,” Tobin whispers, brushing a wisp of dandelion fluff from Christen’s lashes, feeling the weight of an ending pressing heavy over her chest, heavier than the heat and the air and the knowledge that they could be caught at any moment, some passerby stumbling into their private sanctuary. “Hey, Chris?” she whispers, watching as specks of green appear between fluttering eyelashes, but the question on the tip of her tongue slips away as she sees the gentle smile, the wrinkle of the other girl’s nose as another bit of fluff tickles over it.

And Christen sighs happily, contentedly, and for a moment, Tobin wonders what it must be like to live so free of the fear of being found out. “What’s that, baby,” she asks, the very tip of her finger tracing over the edge of Tobin’s thigh, just where the hem of her hand-me-down shorts meets the smooth skin of her leg.

There are a thousand questions Tobin needs to ask, needs answers to. What will happen in the morning, when her family packs their bags and says goodbye to the quiet summer cottage just behind the grand old house where Christen’s grandmother lives, holding strong the memory of all the generations that came before. What will happen when they both return to their real lives, their real selves, cast apart by time and distance and beliefs so old they feel increasingly like tombstones crumbling away to time in long-forgotten cemeteries of the ways things were before.

Before this summer.

Before this girl.

Before this person that Tobin has discovered she can be. Soft and strong and brave and loved.

But she looks into Christen’s spring green eyes and knows, the answers won’t matter. Won’t change the way she feels, won’t change the reality to come.

So instead, she takes Christen’s hand in her own. “Let’s take a swim,” Tobin whispers, her heart feeling full of something like anticipation, something like love.

And it doesn’t take much to convince the other girl. Just the promise of the cool water against their sweaty skin. The wanting of this one moment to keep, wrapped up in nostalgia and hope, for when this summer dream comes to and end.

When the rain comes, the children run out from the houses, barefoot and shirtless, dogs chasing them through swampy fields and muddle lanes. The old men turn up their radios, the sound carrying out the windows to where they dance to faraway baseball games or big band beats, wives laughing as they’re dipped and swung and spun out and back, thoughts of laundry and bills and wars a hundred thousand miles away silent for just a few blissful hours.

And tucked away, down past the hollow, two girls share a moment in the rushing river water, rain falling around them like a curtain. And it doesn’t matter what will happen tomorrow, because they have today. Hope and promise and love.

And for today, this is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> “Indian Summer,” Tori Amos


End file.
